


The Name of the Game

by ApatheticByDefault



Category: Shameless (US)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-23
Updated: 2014-07-23
Packaged: 2018-02-10 00:55:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,666
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2004759
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ApatheticByDefault/pseuds/ApatheticByDefault
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lip never would have imagined he'd one day be so envious of his little brother. And he certainly never would have guessed the cause of that jealousy would be none other than Mickey Milkovich.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Name of the Game

Ian has always been better at the emotional stuff. He smiled so brightly at the sky that the sun was sure to burn his eyes, and he'd be left clenching them shut if only he had found himself quick enough. He always seemed to be handpicked for irony, chosen of all possible contestants to be the odd one out, and perhaps it made him fit best of them all with the entirety of the landscape around him, the one no one around him knew quite how to cope with, and not just that which was immediately placed before him. Ian had always had the foresight to see beyond what he was given. 

His DNA would both save and curse him, sparing him from the wrath of a drunkenly sober father he'd always be bound to, all the while rendering him punished perpetually and without thought by a mother who had long ago left them all in abandonment. He'd feel the greatest of highs only in company to the most painful of lows, and they could never directly bring him to his end. He'd be forced to suffer them in bliss and agony.

Ian dreamt the biggest, and set himself up for the greatest of disappointments. He knew himself the best, but would spend the rest of his life second-guessing every twinge in his gut. He'd always wanted the world around him to be of order, correct and just, but would soon find the greatest barrier of that trust would inevitably be found only in himself.

And it was always going to be him. It was both wrong and perhaps right, because no one else ever would have stood a chance. Being Ian in a world so against him takes simply more than knowledge and strength, it takes soul, and no one else so purely loved life in all his exuberance as readily as Ian did.

He was magnanimous. A sweet boy who knew kindness need not ever be seen only in crumbling before the cruelty of those surrounding him.

He too passionately loved all that fell around him, and he was stepped on most easily of all his siblings because he went of all places where they feared to, and stood only under the tallest of ladders, never using them to reach to the sky to try and grasp the clouds into his hands.

It made sense. Where he trembled among no other, he would ultimately be the only possible destroyer of himself.

Lip doesn't understand how exactly one could ever entice Mickey Milkovich to fall in love, but, however silently, his brother does. And it makes Lip proud.

In sight of a love that could last, Ian should only have ever held a full deck of cards. But Ian is quickly wronged.

Lip knows that the second he finds his brother's magazines, because his brother will only ever find love in _himself_ for a _boy_ , and not one in a sixty-mile radius would ever return it unbroken. Lip doesn't want his brother to change, he wants most desperately for the world engulfing him to, and it simply is not fair.

Ian has always dreamt the biggest, and set himself up for the greatest of disappointments. Lip knows this.

When it is made known Ian has set his eyes on Mickey, Lip is sure the only possible ray of light that can be spotted through Ian's blindness will be a pure clarity. Ian will always be able to find someone better, and, surely, he'll be accepting of them and all their requited affections and adorations, if he can already be so of the unruly and dirt-speckled Milkovich.

If ever the plot of Ian's love story were to be wrenched in a twist, there would likely be a knife at the end of it.

Perhaps it is Lip, though, who has missed something, a haze of disbelief fogging his vision of two pairs of hands grappling at each other, because his brother manages to come out of the fairytale both a damsel and a hero, and he's the most beautiful of all the red-haired princes because of it. A victim and a lucky front-row spectator to both his adaptability and his trust.

Lip is not sure he's ever truly felt the grip of a love so beautiful at all, but he knows certainly he has never managed to make it last, and any and all butterflies died slowly and painfully in a poison swallowed into his stomach through mostly regretful words and slurs. And Lip had estimated his will carefully, as with all else. But the game of love is always a different matter, unpredictable at best.

But even that thought is not enough to discourage Lip from his disbelief. Lip is sure Ian won't be able to climb himself out of the hole he's fallen into alive and unsheathed by the dirt that too covers his unwilling partner, and he certainly won't make it out, at best, still sane.

For the greatest part, Lip seems to be nothing short of right. That doesn't stop his dear brother from crying out in silence from the stillness of his bed for the love he once had. Mickey weds and leaves without movement, but things are never what they seem to be at first glance.

Mickey falls most hard for Ian when Ian is not there, reaching out his hands for the boy and leaning into the touch only to trip into nothingness, having let himself go down and forward with nothing of solidity to hold onto to keep himself from crashing.

Ian gives less than he did before, too distracted by the visions in his head, be them good or bad, because they are seen in such intensity that they give him a pleasurable-before-torturous vertigo. 

Puzzle pieces slide together, because Mickey takes less than he did before too, and gives a whole lot in its place.

Lip is sure the greatest thing about falling for Mickey Milkovich would be that one could always find someone better. But, truly, the greatest thing about falling for Mickey Milkovich is that Mickey Milkovich will never be the one to ask for better. He takes what he is given and kneads it gently to make it fit into place. Mickey doesn't change, and what was once thought to be the curse is now the elixir, because Mickey doesn't know anything more than what he has been dealt and how he's been raised from the shadows to nod his head at them. Lip has never known such an acceptance, and while beautiful, it is coloured in a tragedy Lip has never truly been witness to. So, if anyone has so thoroughly been equipped to deal with the ups and downs life brings, and the ups and downs Ian cannot help but to bring to himself, it is Mickey Milkovich.

A flash of a camera knocks Lip into a present consciousness, and he watches his brother fawn over the hair of the boy in front of him to angle his way into a misplaced photograph.

Lip can recall taking similar pictures of himself alongside a slew of girls, and even fewer "the ones", and expects Mickey will lash out at the unexpected betrayal of ambiguity, and he's right, just not for the reasons he initially thinks.

"Are you taking my goddamned picture?" Mickey looks up then around at Ian, his eyes following Ian as he winds himself from the arm of the chair Mickey sits on.

Ian nods up and down in short strides that make their mark in perfect synchronization with the inches his grin grows to crawl along the sides of his face the longer he looks at the boy placed lazily before him. "So I can keep the memory."

"Of me sitting on your fuckin' couch?" Lip looks between the two of them, but mostly at an eyebrow-raising Mickey, trapped in the body of someone prone to both bleeding and a painfully felt hatred melting off the stocky boy's glares. Mickey reaches to grab for the lenses in a fit of hypothetical smudges, but is caught and stopped by Ian's left hand, who wards off his attacks before wrapping slowly around Mickey's fingers.

"No, just _you,_ who _happens_ to be sitting on my fucking couch." Ian's green eyes look knowing, because their pupils are blown wide and allowing of observation. Lip reverts his steps back into the kitchen to watch slowly in his wakefulness.

"Well, I ain't going anywhere. So just try to focus on the me that's right here, and not the one that's on the little screen, alright? Okay?" It is not in the realm of responses Lip expects most readily to hear.

It is romantic, when layered under a voice of uncertainty that is at last laced with confirmation, that Mickey may very well be hurt by the sudden realization that he is expected to one day be elsewhere, or not be at all. Lip takes another step back and towards the back door.

Lip had taken pictures of himself alongside a scrapbook of girls. It had never crossed his mind not to, that it might not be something he'd one day be in need of, or simply that his life could be a more beautiful story if he'd given it meaning. A want to take the present and hold only it in its entirety, so he'd learn one day not to need to look to the past for answers. They'd continue to lie right before him.

But Lip had always instilled reason into himself, and feared, on some occasion, that he would only have a picture left of the real-life visions of the people who'd once been anything but bleeding hearts, in his hands, touched and grasped tightly. And he'd always, for the most part, been right.

"Yeah, but what if, when we're both old and you're fat and have grey hair, I want to remember what you looked like when we were young and not so ugly, but I don't have any pictures," Ian climbs into his lap, "and my memory is too bad to remember what kind of a furry animal your face once most resembled?" 

Mickey huffs. "Then, that's on you. And, hey, you know, you better not be telling me you're going to be more interested in a memory than in the me that's right there with you, or I'll kick your fucking ass for being so inconsiderate of all the many _more_ memories we'll have built together by then and the new person you _should_ want to remember." 

Mickey means he wants Ian to fall more in love every day, Lip considers, and to want more desperately than not only ever to grasp unto the fleshy version of Mickey that is now worthy of even more than any of his past selves. If Ian just looks at what's in front of him, he won't have to worry about what he's left behind, the Mickey who will have only been a rough copy of himself. It's more romantic than either Lip or any relation of his has ever come close to being, and he wants unmistakably to use Mickey in his philosophy dissertation. Though, maybe a less officially written one, hidden merely under a pile of scrap papers in his head, never making their way into fruition and forming spoken words in his mouth.

"Right, I'm sorry. Forgive me?" Ian starts to trace unseen figures into Mickey's neck and skin, and Lip has to wonder how anyone could possibly want to run their hands and fingers across skin that would leave a residue, but Ian would make it clean, and they'd all see the most beautiful treasures are often found in ruins, left from ancient civilizations, treasures to behold for every passing moment they would make run into a future. And if ever there were to be a person who could save Mickey from dying alone and undiscovered, it would have to be Ian. 

"Fuck off, man." Mickey laughs so airily his command is barely a transgression of sound but more readily a whisper, and shoves Ian to the side of him just as he's leaning in cluelessly for a kiss and misses into Mickey's shoulder. But Mickey just as swiftly wraps his arm around Ian's shoulder and pulls him in all his pseudo-resistance to sit up straight beside him. And his fingers dig gently into the ready padding of Ian's arm.

Ian turns and stares, and Lip isn't certain of that for moments at a time, his face covered by the blurring movements of Mickey's arms cradling him. "Stop looking at me like that." Mickey looks ready to turn away or step out of Ian's embrace and any place else, but he just grips his shoulders more tightly instead.

"Like what?" Ian asks, and he just stares harder. How quickly one's question becomes an accusation when it is only spoken in the recognition of doubt.

"Like..." Mickey trails off, rubbing his eyes and chewing his lip, before mumbling something incoherent under his breath Lip cannot possibly hear. He questions that either of the boys sitting unknowingly from the other room can either. Mickey keeps his head down.

Though, if anyone can get Mickey to turn his head back up for inspection, it's Ian, since no one else could have possibly managed him to lower it in a cowering daze in any first act of surprise. "But I _do_ love you." Ian says, loudly enough for hearing this time, and his voice is as raspy as it is unshakable, and he grabs his... Mickey's face. The quiver in his words reminds Lip of someone in denial, repeating words they've said to themselves a dozen times in hope they'll become as true as a spell cast, someone hoping they'll hear the correct response to their delusions, so they are not the only one working hard to keep the illusion alive.

And Ian has lost the game he's come closest of all others to winning. And he does it with such readiness, in more stupid of a loss than any other loser could have possibly managed, because he'd come so close and had tasted the knowing more stagnantly than any other but had given up so soon, so stupidly. More stupidly than was thought real of anyone else, because he'd seen and known more. He'd had less reason to shelf himself in error, and he still had. He so brutally had. 

Lip waits impatiently for the fallout. He overestimated Ian, and it hurts, because he was winning not just for himself but for everyone else who had failed, and would continue to fail without effort. He thought his little brother had learned to know better than anyone how to play his hand at this game, but he must have been wrong. Now, there was no hope for him or for anyone else he knew, and anyone he ever would, crushed by his past traumas and inability to move forward both in thought and motion. Ian had dealt his cards at the wrong time and too early, and now he would lose more than anyone else would have ever come close to being able to, and with far less reason.

"I love you too," Mickey brushes his lips against Ian's, and Lip's brother furrows his eyebrows, reaching more upward to press his hand into the other boy's face and bring him so much more impossibly close that he only really begins to fall backward. Lip drops his phone.

So things aren't always what they appear to be at first glance. Not the things Mickey feels, when they only rarely fall in place with the things he wishes to bring to life, not Ian's love for Mickey, and not even Ian himself.

So maybe his brother had appeared to, at first glance, have lost a few battles. He'd still done what Lip could have never. He had learned not just to survive the war. He had lived.

 


End file.
